Jimmy Carter’s Pragmatic Path to Power

An Idealist in and After Office, He Became a Governor and a President By Appealing to Racial and Class Prejudice

Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within …

Historian William Sturkey Wins the 10th Annual Zócalo Book Prize  | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Historian William Sturkey Wins the 10th Annual Zócalo Book Prize 

Hattiesburg, an Intimate Look at a Segregated Southern City, Delivers a ‘Finely Woven Microcosm of American Society’

Since 2011, the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize has honored the author of the U.S. nonfiction book published in the previous year that best enhances our understanding of community and …

Why Americans Love Andy Griffith’s Toothy Grin | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Why Americans Love Andy Griffith’s Toothy Grin

In the Post-Civil Rights Era, Images of Southerners as ‘Slow-Witted Rubes’ Soothed White Anxieties

Today, when many Americans think of the “good old days”—when neighbors knew each other and the world seemed safer and simpler—they often conjure visions of the 1950s and early 1960s, …

Our Revelatory Culinary Road Trip Through the New South

What Chorizo, Hummus, and Chiles Rellenos Say About a Changing Region

It was New Year’s Day in Charlotte, North Carolina, and seemingly half of Mecklenburg County had come to the K&W Cafeteria for black-eyed peas, greens, and hog jowls—foods to bring …

How the South Recast Defeat as Victory with an Army of Stone Soldiers

Confederate Monuments to Nameless Infantrymen Were Less About Celebrating History Than Reestablishing Social Order

Monuments to Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders have long been controversial, but monuments to nameless Confederate soldiers, those lone stone figures in public places, are far more …

How Southern Rock Reclaims Regional Identity While Facing Down Old Ghosts

By Reinventing Rebel Attitude, the Allmans and Their Brethren Forged a New Genre

The South spawned rock ’n’ roll. Some scholars pin its arrival to the first week of March, 1951, in Memphis, Tennessee. There, in the studio run by record producer, label …